The completion date of April for the Tuschen Secondary School will not be met, pushing the contract back to June, Education Minister Priya Manickchand has stated.
She made the revelation on Tuesday following questions asked by Stabroek News on her recent visit to the site where the April completion date had been cited.
Asked if the April deadline would be met, she said: “…you’re asking me to step in the shoes of contractors. I can tell you what I’m told. So when I was at Tuschen, and the consultant who also won that contract to be a consultant through a public tender process, I was told that the school is going to be finished, or works that are currently ongoing are going to be finished by the 25th of April 2025. There are, however, some other works that have to be done, such as putting mesh at the top of the classrooms, because the design would not cater for mesh. But now that we have a pigeon problem in the country, which you all know about, we have to now cater for that.
“There is a car park, and we had to terminate the contract for the person who was doing plumbing. So we don’t have plumbing in the school right now, so we have to go back to get a contractor for the plumbing. And if I had to guess, as a lawyer who has had no engineering training, except I now consider myself a builder with all these schools, I would say no, it would not be finished for the 25th of April”, Manickchand stated.
The hope is that the school will be completed by June.
“Our hope is that it’s going to be given to us before June, and that we would have a new school for September 2025”, she said.
The school is being constructed to the tune of $864.705 million and will accommodate over 800 students from Tuschen and neighbouring communities in Region Three.
The one-flat facility with several allied buildings will feature 24 classrooms, laboratories, a TVET centre, canteen, multi-purpose hall and cafeteria, sanitary block, fire prevention mechanisms, and outdoor recreational facility.
The contracts, which were inked in July 2023, were awarded to S&K Construction, AS Construction, VG Group Guyana Inc, N Balgobin & Sons, and K&S General Construction.
